Bienvenidos! Welcome!A blog about Tau-Chain, TML and Agoras.

Tau-Chain.info is an unofficial blog that gathers information from various Internet sites about IDNI projects: Tau, Tau-Chain, Tau Meta Lenguaje and Agoras. This blog does not belong nor is it part of the official Tau project. The purpose of the blog is to make the project known, in an independent way, to people.​Tau is a revolutionary blockchain platform designed to scale up social consensus and accelerate knowledge creation in a decentralized network. Agoras will be an advanced marketplace for knowledge and computational resources built on this framework.

IntroFirst "anyone" is not literal. By anyone I mean anyone with a reasonable level of intelligence who is willing to take the advice generated by the network. The network would include human beings and machines. The network would learn and be more properly defined as a complex adaptive system. Tauchain would enable the emergence of this network. This post is about how the network which can emerge from Tauchain. It is also about how people who intend to be as moral as possible whilst also complying with the law as much as possible might leverage the network. This post assumes that the human brain has a finite memory and comprehension capacity. This post assumes that every human being can benefit from enhancing these naturally limited capacities in areas of legal comprehension and risk literacy (under the assumption that most or perhaps none of us know every law on the books but need to comply with the laws most likely to be aggressively enforced).

The Personal Moral AssistantPMA is a concept I've been thinking about for years now. The idea that we can augment our ability to be moral persons. A PMA is a personal moral assistant and in an ideal world every person born would have one. This would be an interface similar to what we see with Cortana or Siri where you can ask any question pertaining to whether a particular action is right or wrong. This PMA would solve the problem using the same priorities that you would and so you would get a definite right or wrong result.

A Personal Moral Assistant is just one primary use case. But these personal assistants over Tauchain could also include for instance a Personal Compliance Assistant. This is essentially another bot but instead of dealing with moral problems this bot would handle compliance. If you're trying to accomplish a goal this bot would make sure that you do so following all the known laws as your exocortex currently understands it. This would enable people to avoid legal pitfalls whilst chasing opportunities.

In order to go from poor to rich in this world requires taking risks. There is no way around risk taking if you want to get ahead. Risk literacy is essential and very few people who are poor have risk literacy. The PMA might be able to tell a person whether a certain choice aligns with their current values. The PCA might tell a person whether a certain choice complies with the laws. What about opportunities? An opportunity web crawler agent could theoretically search across the entire Internet to find opportunities which match your chosen risk profile.

What are we doing today?Today we have to make choices often in trial and error. If we aren't lucky enough to have mentors or people who can guide us then the only way to learn is to make the common mistakes. When we deal with moral problems today we often rely on holy scripture interpreted by other human beings who are just as flawed as we are. We simply don't have a bot which could interpret the scripture in a completely logical way. In other words we don't have the digital representation of the mind of our spiritual guides.

We also have a situation where some of us can afford to comply with every law and take the lowest risk approach while others simply don't have the resources available to pay the expensive legal fees. Some people get better legal advice than other people as well. What if we could get at least some level of legal assistance from our intelligent assistant? What if this intelligent assistant can even ask human beings who have legal knowledge to help?

And finally what if we could figure out which risks are worth taking and which are not worth taking? It's one thing to find opportunities but another to be able to assess them. People get scammed because at the end of the day our emotions influence our ability to do proper assessment of opportunities. I'm human and it even happens to me from time to time. What if we could avoid this by using the capabilities of Tauchain to analyze massive amounts of information for us which our brains could never handle?

Opportunity Crawler BotI ask a simple hypothetical question: what if you could have set a bot to search the Internet for opportunities that resemble Bitcoin in 2008? What if this bot would be activated and search for an indefinite period of time on an undetermined yet expanding number of networks? If you define "Bitcoin in 2008" in a way which the bot can make sense of then it could search for anything which meets that criteria. We have this technology now but it's extremely primitive. On Google you can set up alerts for certain things but what if you could go beyond mere alerts and look for code on Github, and certain individuals involved with it, and certain growth patterns?

A way to think about these bots / intelligent assistantsOne way to think about these intelligent assistants is as part of your extended mind. These bots essentially help you to think better and communicate better. It's still you and what they do on your behalf is essentially as if you did it. So the total collection of all of these agents which are under your control represent your complete exocortex. It will take great responsibility and wisdom to use these abilities in a way which is perceived by the world as ethical, moral, legal, etc. It is for these reasons that I initiate a discussion on how each of you would like to use such technology if it did exist or such bots or how you would think about them?

Size matters. Some people object that it does not matter, but has meaning. But meaning always matters, so it is the same.

The bigger problems one solves, the bigger the gains. Big problems require big solutions. We live in a big universe and our very survival is to deal with bigger and bigger problems, which require bigger and bigger solutions to cope.

But nevertheless to build big is hard so we naturally prefer to create small things which can grow. Small from point of view both of understandable and affordable to build. So best fit are small solutions, cheap and easy to make which scale out or unfold or unleash into big means to address big problems. Scaling is everything.

Scaling.[1] Scalable! Scalability !!

The root-word 'scale' possesses marvelous riches of meaning in English language [2] with lots of poetics inside.:

The scalability issues could be grokked [6] with the following anecdote:​

Bunch of workers on a construction site and a huge log. The onsite manager commands a few of them to lift and move it. They try and object ''Too heavy!''. The manager adds more and more workers, until they shout back again: ''Too short!''.

A few real examples, the first two - bad and the last three excellent:

[a] I won't name this 'crypto' just will say it is named after a mythical element of the universe, according to the prescientific gnostic [7] imaginations. It's core 'value proposition is to shovel meaningful computation into a thread of computation which very value proposition is to be as random, meaningless and unidirectional (hard to do, easy to prove) as possibly possible - the blockchain. The theoretically most expensive form of computation. Visualize: cars and airplanes made of gold and diamonds burning most expensive perfumes. Or mass production of electricity by raising trillions of cats and hiring trillions of people to pet them with grid of pure gold wires to discharge and collect the electrostatics. If they have chosen the original Satoshi blockchain [8] for their 'experiments' - where the futility of such attempt would become instantly clear and would die out outright due to impending unbearable cost - will of course be more fair way to do, and would've spared dozens of billions of dollars to the Mankind, but logically they preferred a 'controlled' blockchain of their own. In a sense that the guys with vested interest into it have the power to hand-drive, stop, restart and vivisect it. The only use of this 'blockchain supercomputer' is ... tokenomics by Layering. Why it was at all necessary for a blockchain advertised as so good as to do all the general computation, to be made so hairy and bushy with layered tokens??

[b] Another trio of chaps, won't mention names again, were really at awe with Satoshi's creation, so much that they not just liked, but wanted it and decided to have it. For themselves. All of it. And rebelled and forked out and provided 'scaling' errrmm ... uhhh... solution. By increasing the blocksize. Something which Satoshi meditated on, extensively discussed with his disciples and not occasionally decided to put breaks on. [9] Very recently the crypto news headlines said that the blocksize increase solution providers are eyeing ... Layering. Which they furiously were advocating that blocksize increase makes unnecessary. Cause it is the solution, isn't it? Or maybe it just was. And is not anymore? Well, I'd say that all the aka 'alts' [10] - to provide a rejuvenated clone of Bitcoin tweeked here and there to provide momentary ease of difficulty and transaction fees - suffer from one and a same problem - traveling back in time does not tell you the future.

[c] Lets jump half a century back in time. It is 1960es. The very making of internet. Computers are already here and scaled up in numbers so their networking to become a problem/juice worth the solution/squeeze. The birth of TCP/IP [11] and the report of the very makers of it. Of the solution for the network scaling. Enjoy the ancient wisdom:

Initially, the TCP managed both datagram transmissions and routing, but as the protocol grew, other researchers recommended a division of functionality into protocol layers. Advocates included Johnatan Postel of the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, who edited the Request for Comments (RFCs), the technical and strategic document series that has both documented and catalyzed Internet development. Postel stated, "We are screwing up in our design of Internet protocols by violating the principle of layering." Encapsulation of different mechanisms was intended to create an environment where the upper layers could access only what was needed from the lower layers. A monolithic design would be inflexible and lead to scalability issues. The Transmission Control Program was split into two distinct protocols, the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol.

The layering made the Internet as we know it. By the simple trick of just one node needed to permit another. Unstoppable inclusivity!

[d] The Mastercoin / Omni Layer [12]:​

«A common analogy that is used to describe the relation of the Omni Layer to bitcoin is that of HTTP to TCP/IP: HTTP, like the Omni Layer, is the application layer to the more fundamental transport and internet layer of TCP/IP, like bitcoin».

[e] The Lightning network (LN) [13]:​

The Lightning Network is a "second layer" payment protocol that operates on top of a blockchain (most commonly Bitcoin).

​Satoshi spoke on 'payment' channels in his masterpiece. Foreseeing the way to scale.

An estimate of the power of LN layering [14].:

''The bitcoin devs accept that eventually larger block sizes will be needed. The current transaction rate isn't going to cut it if people all over the world actually start using bitcoin daily. They estimate that eventually, if everyone in the world uses bitcoin and makes 2 transactions a day, but uses the lightning network, a 133mb blocksize will be needed. Without the lightning network, something like a 200gb (GIGABYTE) size PER BLOCK would be needed to accommodate that much usage.''

​Layering upscales it with orders of magnitude of higher efficiency.

If Bitcoin is the 'first layer' and Omni and Lightning are 'second layer', I see which one is the 'Zeroth Layer' and also foresee [15] the inevitability of the merger or 'Amalgamation' of all second layers over all blockchains, so the user will be able to transact everything into anything to anybody, without to know or care which chain is in use ... I have special nicknames for these and will go back to these topics in series of future posts.

Enough of examples I reckon.

The Postel's sacred Principle of Layering comes from the implementation levels paradigm.​

or Abstraction layering [16]:​

''separations of concerns to facilitate interoperability and platform independence''

With other words - delegate the task to that layer of the system which does the particular job best. We can generalize this into The Scaling Commandment. Only one enough:

Something Revolutionary In the Crypto Space.​The overwhelming majority of new crypto projects out there fall into 3 main categories:​

A pure currency with a twist, be it anonymity, speed, no transactions fees, no transactions at all etc.

A smart contract platform with a minor adjustment in trade offs - offering less security for more performance, more security for less performance, less security for less performance etc.

A quasi unintentional scam; the sort of idea that sounds pretty good at the pub after you've all downed 6 or 7 drinks, then instead of waking up and realizing it's stupid, proceed to put together a fancy website and kick an ICO based off of it. (I honestly think maybe 90%+ of cryptos belong in this group)

Now the trillion dollar question is this: is just having a currency or shoving a Turing Complete programming language into the blockchain to allow for smart contracts truly the best use of this decentralized innovation? Ohad Asor, creator and lead developer of Tau, does not think so.

tau-chain logo by CapitanArt.

What Is Tau?

Before I start I have to make a confession: I don't truly understand Tau. But I feel that I don't understand it slightly less than people who don't know about it at all, so I'll have a go at explaining it.

Tau is a platform that is designed to scale human collaboration and knowledge building.

Almost every significant piece of technology to date (that isn't about accelerating physical labor) has been primarily focused on the disseminating information or data. The wheel, roads, telephones, the internet are all indispensable achievements that have served to aid getting information from A to B.

But the real value isn't in the data itself, it's from the organization of the information within that data into useful knowledge. While the mere distribution of information is an important step to scaling human progress, it's also only part of the picture. The next step has typically been up to us, the human actors, to use our little brains to distill that information manually until we produce knowledge;

Tau is the first piece of serious technology that is aimed to not only automate the collection of information, but also the production of knowledge, unless you count Netflix's 'AI' recommending 'The Human Centipede' after your toddler has just watched 'A Bug's Life', as successful knowledge discovery made by a machine. Tau is about the industrialization of knowledge creation via taking some of the burden of logical reasoning from us humans and giving it to the machine.

What Can Tau Do?

Ohad has spent years researching and developing Tau. The design is centered around creating a self defining, decidable logic that is expressible under pspace (which is mathematically shown to be the most expressive any self defining and decidable language can be), that will act as a metalanguage for all programming languages defined under Tau.

A trivial example of what this can directly lead to is secure smart contracts. Smart contracts operating under Tau cannot ever give rise to something like the DAO hack - decidable programming languages means one can anticipate the entire spectrum of possible consequences of the code before running it, allowing us to avoid anything unintended. But reliable and secure smart contracts are only a tiny fraction of what the platform can truly offer.

The power of Tau's design will allow it to boast some truly wondrous features including:

Scalable social governance by automatically detecting consensus among its user base via their logical propositions rather than through voting which is mathematically flawed and inefficient.

Scale human collaborative endeavors by organizing the individual propositions of large groups of experts in their respective fields and logically deducing new knowledge from these propositions.

Synthesize code by automatically constructing code from its knowledge base according to the users specifications.

And many more features further along like a knowledge market, automated virtual economy and an advanced derivatives market.

Ohad has yet to fully explain how this will be achieved, but by far the most difficult part is creating the initial decidable, self defining logic system that serves as a metalanguage. Many had their doubts but yesterday Ohad announced that the first and most difficult step towards this end has been achieved. The codehe has written is a working version of the Tau Meta Language which correctly computed a transitive closure graph. This is a proof of concept of the great things to come!

Now that the initial code is released, Ohad is working on a set of explanations about Tau which will outline it's features and how it'll be able to achieve them in more detail. Tau is notoriously difficult to explain, but it's definitely worth the effort to understand it. I'll keep you updated when his explanations are released.

Most people know me as the clown on here who just writes jokes along the lines of taking his mom to the prom after his cousin rejected him or some shit, but I sat my university entrance exams at 16 and scored in the top 0.5% of Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank and took a prestigious course at a well known university. I only bring this up to show that I've had no shortage of dealings with what ordinarily would be considered to be extremely intelligent people, but Ohad is on a completely different level.

Ohad Asor is, quite frankly, the most intelligent and knowledgeable person with whom I've ever interacted. There are many geniuses and child prodigies out there, but Ohad has spent virtually every minute of his waking moments studying up until this point in his life, and he likely has an IQ of over 5 standard deviations above the mean to begin with. I have spoken to him and followed his project over the past 8 months, and my assessment and admiration of his abilities has only increased over this time period.

Here is a short video of him explaining the old design of Tau and some of its features. The information is dated as the new design is far superior, but these features remain.​

English is Ohad's second language - His native language is C.

How Do I Invest In Tau?

Tau itself has no tokens but Ohad is also building Agoras, the first automated marketplace over the Tau collaborative platform. Agoras tokens are currently traded on Bittrex. It has one of the fairest distributions in the cryptosphere and Ohad is only reserving 3% of the tokens for himself. None of that 20% for the founders, 10% for the developers, 20% for the foundation, 15% for the founders' penis enlargement fund bullshit.

Agoras has made considerable gains over the last few weeks but it's total market cap is still under 100 million at the time of writing, which, to me, represents an incredible opportunity for something potentially revolutionary. If we woke up tomorrow without Bitcoin, things would more or less continue as they did, but if we woke up tomorrow without electricity, the world would be an entirely different place. Indeed Tau aims to be the latter: a truly indispensable piece of technology, which is a status that no crypto project has yet reached.

This article isn't to be taken as investment advice any more than it is to be construed as advice on how to get out of the friend zone without resorting to chloroform. I'm not affiliated nor paid by the Tau team in any way. I have not made a single crypto recommendation in my 8 months of being here until now. I just wanted to share something that I think has immense potential to be truly revolutionary, and it also happens to be the only other crypto investment I hold other than Steem.

Feel free to ask some questions after and I'll try my best to answer them.

Special thanks to @dana-edwards and the Steemit platform for allowing me to discover this project

tau-chain.info is not the official site of Tau-Chain. This website has NO affiliation or relationship with the company or IDNI organization, and its contents are neither approved nor supervised by it. The website is dedicated to collaborate with the community and helping Tau and Agoras to progress in a sustainable way.